


he digs his hands into the earth and cries

by perfectingsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Character Study, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, The Winter Soldier is a separate personality, but also so is Bucky, but it's very non graphic and very quick i swear, following his escape from Hydra, hurt little comfort, it's confusing honestly idk, kind of?, like they work together bc teamwork, prose, recurring motifs bc i'm a lit nerd, there is a fox and he's a major character and I love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 11:24:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19108684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectingsilence/pseuds/perfectingsilence
Summary: When he finally escapes, finally breaks into the code of his conditioning and snaps the immediately binding pieces like a mirror on pavement, he feels nothing. Emotions overrun by survival, shoved by the waves of instinct and pushed beneath the water, again and again and again(so familiar, drowning with the shore in reach).Nights still pass in a haze of syrupy confusion, the cold air and the aftershocks swirling together to bring him liquid existence served in a fever dream, a spoonful of honey added in(it gets stuck in his throat, as thick as the secrets The Boy From Brooklyn remembers keeping and half as sugar-sweet, too).





	he digs his hands into the earth and cries

**Author's Note:**

> Aka I listened to too much Hozier (what's new?) and also got my first MacBook and the resulting cocktail is this baby. It's a little scary to be back on here publishing stuff for the world to see, but hey, research for this story means that now I know sooo much about foxes, so that's a win. It's all a give and take.

When he finally escapes, finally breaks into the code of his conditioning and snaps the immediately binding pieces like a mirror on pavement, he feels nothing. Emotions overrun by survival, shoved by the waves of instinct and pushed beneath the water, again and again and again  
(so familiar, drowning with the shore in reach).

He slips away, out of the reach of his handlers and into the reach of the trees; their branches grasp at him, twist and morph into skeletal hands, seeking him in the dark  
(cold, confused, scary, _wrong_ ).

With dawn comes the sun, her rays reaching for him slowly and ever more tentative than the skeletoid branches of midnight. To The Soldier this means danger, easier to be sighted and harder to run, but to The Boy From Brooklyn, it means home  
(golden hour reflected in locks of blond is something he didn’t know could be a feeling, but it is, and _God_ how he yearns).

He digs his hands deep into the soil, inhales the heavy scent of earth, and cries.

Running is far from a novelty, but doing so of his own volition: it’s something he could see himself getting used to  
(only if he gets the chance, only if he gets away).

The fox finds him curled against a tree and shaking, hair in his eyes and sweat on his skin and earth in the joints of his hand. He hasn’t been eating enough; food is a matter of survival in the long term, and The Brooklyn Boy has acknowledged the use of The Soldier’s prioritization. Slow, cautious, the fox trots up to him, ears back and tail low in submission. Even nature recognizes him as a predator  
(and here he thought he was so irreparably removed from anything close to being natural).

He feels himself freeze with indecision, almost as painful as its literal twin. The Soldier, ever the opportunist, goes through the mental motions of raising a stone and securing a meal. Despite the logic, the lack of challenge, the necessity of survival, The Brooklyn Boy refuses. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t  
(she always wanted a dog and he doesn’t know who she was but he knows that she wanted a dog and he knows that _he can’t_ ).

As the creature approaches, a frightened animal and a mirror all at once, he allows himself to maintain a stillness somewhere between man and machine, imitating nature in false easiness   
(to The Brooklyn Boy it’s muscle memory and he stings with it, antiseptic on a wound and a fake grin to match).

When it lowers its body and raises its tail, ears and eyes up, playful and young, he thinks he could understand.

The hour passes and he has to move; this body has become a matter of give and take, and The Soldier’s given enough on recent matters to deserve something in return. He’s not anxious, per say, but his cool focus still raises the hairs on the human arm, and it’s enough: he keeps moving.

He leaves a handful of berries behind on a bed of just-decaying leaves, a peace offering for the tiny thing with curious eyes and fur the color of fire with none of the matching spark.

Nights still pass in a haze of syrupy confusion, the cold air and the aftershocks swirling together to bring him liquid existence served in a fever dream, a spoonful of honey added in  
(it gets stuck in his throat, as thick as the secrets The Boy From Brooklyn remembers keeping and half as sugar-sweet, too).

The mornings are better, he thinks, and his breath catches at the preference that has formed, founded unconsciously in the hollow space beneath his ribs and nurtured into something quick and absolute. 

These days he is starting to feel like a person, and The Soldier scoffs, because being a weapon doesn’t keep him from being human. It’s a fine line, Brooklyn thinks, as he juggles the knowledge of death with that of living, once—so long ago—and maybe now again. The gentle shift is not as he thought it would be, liberating and wonderful and the refreshing chill of jumping into a lake all at once. It’s lonely, instead: desolate and boring and purposeless in a way he’s never been allowed, not even before The Soldier, not even before The War. Sometimes he finds himself missing the simplicity of his capture, the voice of a handler, and he shakes until he retches.

Escape is not as easy as following the river to its mouth, tracing along until the ocean is found. Maybe he should have waited until they sent him somewhere else, until the mission parameters were relayed and he was released to wreak havoc yet again. The idea that he may have disappeared by then—that they might have seen the cracks within him and filled them back in with ice and lies and pain—is testimate enough that he made the right choice. He can’t handle more blood on his hands, more substance to rust in the gaps of his being. Still, even trekking through the forest that seems in the moonlight to never end  
(oh God, he’ll be trapped in these trees forever, he’s going to die here, oh God, oh God, _oh God_ ),  
he makes progress, moving farther from his starting point with each pass of the sun and her beautiful soothing rays. The increase in distance does little to quell his worries; there is no limit to how far they will come for him, and he knows sure in his soul that they will never stop, two heads regrowing where one was severed, two men to find him for each he evades. 

He finds the fox curled beneath a tree and shaking, fear in its eyes and mud on its paws and fur matted with blood. Maybe The Soldier is beginning to soften or maybe The Boy From Brooklyn is starting to toughen up or maybe they’ve never really been such separate things after all, because his response is starkly lacking either the clinicality of machine or the heartbreak of man; what takes their place instead is quiet resignation.

Slowly, he approaches, assiduous in his attempt not to frighten  
(still not sure that frightening is something he’s allowed not to be).  
He wants to help, he just wants to help, and it’s part remembering what this creature gave him and what it deserves in turn, and part the recognition he sees in its clever yellow eyes, and part the sudden suffocating need to be good. The gentle thing startles when he gets close enough to pose genuine threat, subtle as though the fear is more instinct than intellect. After all, it has little reason to be afraid, now. He leans down. 

It looks up at him and it meets his eyes and it is in pain; he understands.

He raises a stone and secures his humanity.

A day passes, and then a week, and then another. The Soldier keeps his practicality, even as The Boy From Brooklyn begins passing the nights stargazing, eyes wide with wonder at all he’s missed and all he hasn’t. Some things never change. 

There are instances. Searchers get too close for comfort out of sheer luck; he’s varied his direction enough to be unpredictable but not too much to lose progress. They’ve trained him well, but he’s still been trained, and he fears that there has to be someone, somewhere, who will be good enough to find him. _There isn’t_ , The Soldier reassures, and he feels better for it. 

He wonders how the world has changed without him in it, even as he knows that a lot of the world’s change has been because he’s been in it. 

Some days he thinks he might have finally won, might have finally fought himself back and pushed all of the bad away, bottled up in glass and released at shore to bob across the world and end up far, far away. He still flinches at sounds in the dark and knows he hasn’t  
(the berries taste like wine, right up until the moment they taste like poison, and he chokes on every life he never lived and every one he did). 

The tactical gear was formed special, just for him, but the exertion of escape still leaves him with blisters hot and angry on his heels. Surely this isn’t the first time he’s stressed his body like this, but if he’s ever bubbled his skin on missions before, he doesn’t remember it. He decides, just because he can, that he’s far enough to justify easing up. He fills the extra time lying across branches, hearing the birds’ song and studying the refraction of sun rays filtering through the tree leaves  
(sometimes it feels like homesick, wicked and cruel and unfillable, but sometimes it feels like a peace he can finally wrap his fingers around).

In the nights, he thinks of how easy it would be to stop, to let them take him back and fix whatever broke in his programming and put an end to it all  
(to make it all stop).

In the mornings, he thinks of himself and the fox, and how they are both defined by rust.

They are both defined by rust.

He keeps moving.

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily recommend Hozier's: "In the Woods Somewhere," "Wasteland, Baby!" and "As It Was"
> 
> Also, thanks for reading :)


End file.
